The 1984 calendar published by Left Bank Books in Seattle (still there!) is, to our knowledge, the only calendar the collective produced. The reference is, of course, to Orwell’s classic text. This calendar is very much a product of the aesthetics of American anarchism of the period where situationist-inspired, typically detourned images make-up each page preceding the day-by-day breakdown of January through December. These kinds of images were often found in the pages of Fifth Estate in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the work of Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous (John Zerzan and Dan Todd’s prolific grouping) etc. Later, this kind of artwork would become massively popular through work of Gran Fury, Adbusters, and eventually the billions of memes that populate social media.
None of the images are credited but some of familiar to us and perhaps easily identified by readers of this blog.
There is a long history of anarchist and radical calendars and it’s not clear whether the authors of this calendar used earlier radical calendars to fill the dates up. The back cover mentions a handful of sources:
Some of the choices are, if nothing else, humorous. For example, something as significant as the indictments of the Vancouver 5 in 1983 is given as much space as the 1951 birth of Bob Black. On January 9th, 1905 the french anarchist Louise Michel “unlives” (others also “unlive” throughout the calendar). Generally speaking the editorial choices in what the authors’ highlight on a given day hold up.
The calendar is rare with only a single institutional holding showing at OCLC (at Labadie) but shows up for sale from time to time. For interested readers a picture of each month from the calendar is below.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 